November 2012

I bought a Nikon D3100 back in July, and have been very impressed with its handling and abilities. I’ve taken several thousand pictures so far, and thought I’d post three of my better ones. I have quite a few like these, but I’ll save those for my $200 2 inch thick coffee table book. Enjoy!

This bird hit one of our picture windows, and as it recovered on the nearby branch of a burning bush, I snapped some pictures of it. Even though I only used my 18-55mm VR kit lens, I was able to get close enough to get this nearly frame-filling shot, since the bird “played dead” rather than flying from me. As soon as I moved, the bird flew away, unfazed.

We went to our grandparents house for Thanksgiving, and right next door was this neat looking old barn. I walked over, leaned across the barbed wire fence, and snapped a few shots. This one is my favorite. The framing turned out the best of all those I shot, and I was able to get a good chunk of sky into the shot as well. A storm was going by about 10 miles away, so I got some interesting cloud coverage as a backdrop for the barn.

I took this picture while sitting on the roof of our van, to keep stray light from street lights from getting into my lens. I still got some light from the moon, but it created a cool ghosting effect that I actually like, rather than washing out the entire picture. To take this picture I put my camera on a tripod, set the shutter for the longest available (30 sec on my D3100, unless you count Bulb), set a 10 second timer, and jumped off the roof of our van while the timer counted down to prevent camera shake during the exposure. The thing that looks like a shooting star on the right isn’t- its a plane. It still looks cool though!